Merger mania

>> Letting the PQ take a sledgehammer to suburban borders will be downright catastrophic

by LOUIS RASTELLI

Across the province, nearly every city is being restructured against its will, and it seems the only people not complaining are downtown Montrealers. Mirror columnist Kristian Gravenor is all for the mergers, because he thinks he'll be able to bring his children to any pool on the island. What he doesn't realize is he'll probably have to pay a toll to Amalgamated Playgrounds whenever he does.

In Mega-Toronto, city council has suggested that children pay a 25-cent toll to enter playgrounds. Though the PQ may couch it in noble-sounding terms, the point of our mergers is also to make cities function more like for-profit enterprises. This is why the PQ has hand-picked a crew of corporate businesspeople to design our new city in secret. This is also why they're carrying out such an immense restructuring so quickly and without public participation. Just a year ago, Bourque's "one-island one-city" option was considered the least practical of all possibilities. Now that it's suddenly being forced on us, it's also about Quebec becoming a sort of elected dictatorship.

I bet you the PQ is laughing over the usual lefties not noticing the privatization aspect of mergers. It's a shame that the Gazette is taking such a strong stance against the mergers, because it's kind of disgusting to feel like I'm on their side. But it's even worse to see an alternative weekly write off the whole issue as if no one should care about it. Meanwhile, no one's noticed that an executive from SNC-Lavalin is in charge of creating the megacity's budget. The transition committee even announced a plan to put water meters on every faucet in town, and few noticed. Are we sure we also want privatized water with our mergers?

Mergers are not just a suburb issue. Its real causes are deeply rooted in, for lack of a less over-used term, the "corporate agenda" which was violently opposed in Quebec City. Such amalgamations were part of IMF loan conditions to developing countries in the 1990s. These poorer countries had no choice but to accept privatized municipal services as a way of ensuring they'd pay back their loans. In Canada, governments are forcing city mergers out of pure opportunism, along with the notion that our cities would soon have to "compete" with these foreign megacities to attract investors. (They won't have to compete with American megacities, however, because forcing mergers is unconstitutional in the U.S.)

Forced mergers also redefine local democracy--on their terms. The recent pesticide ban in Ile Bizard showed that one of the best defences against corporate globalization is local political will. Minimizing this "impediment" to free markets, on our island, will mean chopping the number of elected representatives to less than half the amount we now struggle with.

Personally, I think taking a few years to carefully examine our region and re-structure it would be an excellent idea. Many environmental issues, for example, could be addressed if the mergers were done carefully and in a process open to interested people, groups and experts. However, simply having the PQ take a "sledgehammer" to suburban borders, as Gravenor describes it, could be downright catastrophic.

Also, I don't understand how anyone can be comfortable with the idea that municipalities which pre-date Confederation were created by the provincial government, who may therefore abolish them at will. If it turns out that that's what our constitution allows, then we'd sure better change it before these elected dictators do something worse.

The fact is, even people who think the whole island should be merged together should be dead set against these forced mergers. We should all stop fighting each other and fight for the chance to re-make our cities ourselves.

Louis Rastelli is the editor of Fish Piss and runs the Distroboto zine-and-art vending machine at Casa del Popolo